Marta Siemiarczuk

Marta Siemiarczuk is a lawyer at Nelligan O’Brien Payne, and practices in the areas of Family Law Litigation and Collaborative Family Law, Estates and Civil Litigation. Marta has also expanded her practice to include providing Family Law Arbitration Services.

Prior to joining the firm, Marta was with a large national firm in Ottawa, where she practiced in civil litigation and family law until 2008. In 2009 Marta focused exclusively in the area of family law in a boutique firm in London, Ontario, where she also sat on the Executives of the Middlesex Family Law Association and the Collaborative Lawyers of London and Middlesex.

Marta has acted as a co-instructor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, for Civil Procedure and the Alternative Dispute Resolution Program. She is a regular guest lecturer at the University of Ottawa in Family Law. She is also a regular columnist on various family law topics for the Law Times.

Marta approaches her work in a client-centered manner, always striving to be efficient and to provide practical and creative solutions. She derives great satisfaction in practicing family law, as it allows her to be involved in a tangible way with her clients, able to make meaningful differences to their lives. And while she is dedicated and very driven, she also maintains a good sense of humour.

The focus of her days outside of the office is her family, who motivate Marta to maintain a healthy perspective. Weekends find her either tinkering with renovations around the home, playing with her kids, or getting outdoors to go camping, hiking or canoeing.

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Latest Articles & Blog Posts

If you are one of the many people who got engaged over the holidays, a new year brings with it new beginnings – but are you prepared for the financial responsibility to your partner? Family Law lawyer Marta Siemiarczuk explains some of the things you should think about when preparing a marriage contract.

Outside of her family law practice, Marta Siemiarczuk has also been busy this year writing a series of articles for legal newspaper Law Times. Looking at cases from the Ontario Court of Appeal, Marta explored everything from retirement to marriage contracts.

For many years now, the issue of enforceability of a Maher marriage contract as well as its interrelationship with provincial family law property regimes has been considered by our courts. This issue was put before the Ontario Court of Appeal very recently in Bakhshi v. Hosseinzadeh, 2017 ONCA 838 and the court’s analysis of this particular Maher is worthy of review by those practising family law in Ontario.

An age-old argument around who a child’s primary caregiver is was recently rekindled in the Court of Appeal. The case, Porter v. Bryan, 2017 ONCA 677, dealt with mobility rights and the parents of a five-year-old boy.

A short but important decision came out of the Court of Appeal recently. In Ernikos v. Ernikos, 2017 CarswellOnt 6285, the court considered whether Minutes of Settlement relating to, among other things, equalization of net family property continued to be valid and binding on the parties after they reconciled and then separated again.

A recent case involving a motion to change spousal support is important to Ontario practitioners because it contains a good analysis of the use of Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines in support reviews and deals with the crossover between equalized pension income and unequalized pension income.